E. M. FORSTER
Night and Day seems to me a deliberate exercise in classicism. It contains all that has characterised English fiction for good or evil during the last hundred and fifty years—faith in personal relations, recourse to humorous side shows, insistence on petty social differences. Even the style has been normalised, and though the machinery is modern, the resultant form is as traditional as Emma. Surely the writer is using tools that don’t belong to her.
—from New Criterion (April 1926)
ARNOLD BENNETT
Virginia Woolf has passionate praisers, who maintain that she is a discoverer in psychology and in form. Disagreeing, I regard her alleged form as the absence of form, and her psychology as an uncoordinated mass of interesting details, none of which is truly original.
—from The Realist (April 1929)
W. H. AUDEN
I cannot imagine a time, however bleak, or a writer, whatever his school, when and for whom [Virginia Woolf’s] devotion to her art, her industry, her severity with herself—above all, her passionate love, not only or chiefly for the big moments of life but also for its daily humdrum “sausage-and-haddock” details—will not remain an example that is at once an inspiration and a judge.
—from the New Yorker (March 6, 1954)
Questions
1. What is the problem in Night and Day? Is it in Katharine? In the men she knows or in men in general? In the manners and morals of her time and place? In the human condition?
2. Some of Woolf’s contemporaries described the novel as aloof, distant, classical. Is there anything in the novel that reveals the author’s relation to her material? Can you see Woolf in the book?
3. The courtship between Katharine and Ralph, writes Rachel Wetzsteon in the introduction to this edition, “results in some of the most ravishing passages in the novel, and one of the most moving accounts ever written of being in love” (see p. xxi). What in these passages, in either the style or the content, might Wetzsteon be referring to?
4. Do you sympathize with Katharine? Is one’s sympathy or lack of sympathy for Katharine likely to depend on whether one is a man or a woman? Could Night and Day be fairly described as a feminist novel?
FOR FURTHER READING
Works by Virginia Woolf
BOOKS PUBLISHED DURING WOOLF’S LIFETIME
The Voyage Out. London: Duckworth, 1915.
Night and Day. London: Duckworth, 1919.
Monday or Tuesday. London: Hogarth Press, 1921.
Jacob’s Room. London: Hogarth Press, 1922.
The Common Reader. London: Hogarth Press, 1925.
Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press, 1925.
To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.
Orlando: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1928.
A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.
The Waves. London: Hogarth Press, 1931.
The Common Reader: Second Series. London: Hogarth Press, 1932.
Flush: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1933.
The Years. London: Hogarth Press, 1937.
Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press, 1938.
Roger Fry: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1940.
OTHER WORKS
Between the Acts. London: Hogarth Press, 1941.
Collected Essays. Edited by Leonard Woolf. 4 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1966, 1967.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1975-1980.
Freshwater: A Comedy. Edited by Lucio Ruotolo. London: Hogarth Press, 1976. A play.
Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. London: Chatto and Windus, 1976.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1977.
Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks. Edited by Brenda R. Silver. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
The Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited by Susan Dick. London: Hogarth Press, 1985.
The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. 4 vols. of a projected 6. London: Hogarth Press, 1986—.
A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. London: Hogarth Press, 1990.
BIOGRAPHY AND BACKGROUND
Annan, Noel. Leslie Stephen: The Godless Victorian. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984.
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. 2 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1972. The first major study of Woolf’s life, written by her nephew.
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1989.
Boyd, Elizabeth French. Bloomsbury Heritage: Their Mothers and Their Aunts. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976.
Dunn, Jane. A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. London: Jonathan Cape, 1990.
Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. The most thorough biography to date.
Marcus, Jane, ed. Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1987. Several useful chapters on Bloomsbury members.
Nicolson, Nigel. Virginia Woolf. New York: Viking, 2000. A concise study, written by the son of Woolf’s friends Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West.
Rose, Phyllis. Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
Spalding, Frances. Vanessa Bell. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.
Stape, J. H., ed. Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1995.
Stephen, Sir Leslie. The Mausoleum Book. Introduction by Alan Bell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. Stephen wrote this epistolary memoir to mourn the death of his wife and Woolf’s mother, Julia, in 1895.
Woolf, Leonard. An Autobiography. 2 vols. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. First published in five volumes by the Hogarth Press, London (1960-1969) under the titles Sowing, Growing, Beginning Again, Downhill All the Way, and The Journey Not the Arrival Matters.
. The Wise Virgins: A Story of Words, Opinions, and a Few Emotions. London: Edward Arnold, 1914. A novel containing recognizable portraits of Virginia and Vanessa, as well as of Leonard and his family.
CRITICISM
Bazin, Nancy Topping. Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973. A chapter on Night and Day describes Katharine’s “quest for the point of equilibrium between the inner and the outer, the feminine and the masculine.”
Briggs, Julia, ed. Virginia Woolf: Introduction to the Major Works. London: Virago, 1994. Excellent essays by various critics.